Week 6 began with the completion of the second robot chassis that took into account issues with the first chassis. Programming finished coding for the robot. The vision processing  allowed for toggling between two USB cameras and the robot could auto align on the tower. The autonomous was fine tuned to fit the new robot, and all the errors were cleared from the teleop code. Some issues affecting the robot design were fixed like crossing under the low bar, and the motors scraping against the ground. Electrical team adjusted its electronics to fit a smaller space due to design constraints from the first chassis. After that, finishing touches were applied to any remaining issues. 

During the fifth build week, Team SPORK finished a working version of the robot design. It was fully drivable, but was missing its final shooting mechanism, ball intake system, and arm. After taking what they learned from the first version, mechanical started production of a second robot to fix the mistakes from the original. Production began on the second robot while the shooting mechanism and ball intake systems were added to the original. The final concept of the arm was completed, with production beginning.

The programming team mapped out and began coding the autonomous portion of the program codes. They encountered minor setbacks with vision processing, but they were soon fixed. Vision processing was adapted to allow us to switch between two USB cameras.

The electrical team, with only a diminutive amount of room to work with, mapped out where the electronics will go in the little amount of space given. They then installed the electronics onto the first version of the robot.

The team is very excited (and somewhat relieved) to be nearing the end of build season!

Thanks to our CAD team, the fabrication of our robot was good to go this week. Meetings at NuVision started becoming a daily thing in order to finish the fabrication work on the robot. Programming worked on tuning the vision processing, so that we could balance fps (frames per second) with pixel quality. More errors were knocked out of the robot code, especially some that stopped the robot from moving completely. Several prototypes for the shooting mechanism were designed and tested. After a bit of messing with the angle and distance we managed to get it to work with decent accuracy. Our Electrical team started planning out the block-diagram, and teaching rookies AutoCAD Electrical. The awards team finished the chairman’s submission and thanks to our business team and our website team, we got a donation box setup where we have already received money from gracious donors. An employee from Lowe’s visited during a Saturday meeting to help us out and is coming more often.

Due to the snow this week, Team SPORK had a few days off, but that did not stop SPORK. Meetings were held online and we were rewarded with success. CAD and Programming teams were hard at work creating crucial parts for the robot. CAD spent a majority of their time finishing robot designs before beginning fabrication. While the Programming team worked to successfully program vision processing cameras to detect the distance to the goals. The fabrication team finished the chassis and the shooter design was finalized and ready to be built. Meanwhile, the Awards team finished and turned in our Chairman’s Award and Woodie Flowers Mentor Award. Business team is hard at work creating the Team SPORK standard.

Only three weeks left before Bag-n-Tag night and the robot is well underway!

This week Team SPORK started to meet for programming sessions to train our rookies and to sharpen our veteran’s skills. Our awards team has been hard at work finalizing the script for our chairman’s video and they finished the rough draft for our Woodie Flowers essay. Last but not least our CAD team has been working on fleshing out our robot design and will be finishing soon. We look forward to the next few weeks and wish the best of luck to other teams.

Our mock field at NuVision Engineering is coming along great. We already have a tower  with rungs attached and the windows set up. We’ve fully completed the Rough Terrain, and the rest of the obstacles are on the way.